HBO’s Jamaica-set mystery is gripping

Television is full of mystery series. HBO alone has had several breakout hits in recent years, including “Mare of Eastown,” “The Undoing” and the latest episode of the “True Detective” franchise. But with its unique location and distinct characters, “Get Millie Black,” the network’s latest five-episode limited series set in Kingston, Jamaica, stands on its own. Created by Booker Prize-winning novelist Marlon James, who adapted the show from his own short story, “Get Millie Black,” it begins as a missing persons case and develops into a massive web of corruption and violence that stretches beyond Jamaica’s coasts. London streets.

When the audience is first introduced to Millie Black, she and her young brother Orville are basking in the sun. Songs, secrets and nail polish act as a reprieve from their abusive mother. Unfortunately, the siblings’ childhood innocence is destroyed when, after an argument, Millie is sent to Britain as punishment. Some time after her arrival, she learns that Orville is dead. Some two decades later, in the wake of her mother’s death, Millie (an extraordinary Tamara Lawrance) leaves her detective role at London’s Scotland Yard and returns to Kingston. She discovers that Orville is now Hibiscus (Chyna McQueen). Feeling abandoned by Millie, Hibiscus has also been hardened by childhood trauma and a country that has criminalized her identity and her profession: sex work.

Millie’s role as a missing person detective for the Jamaica Police Force consumes her. While working on the case of a missing teenage girl, Janet Fenton (an excellent Shernet Swearine), who has apparently been taken in by an older wealthy man, Freddie Summerville (Peter John Thwaites), Millie and her partner Curtis (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr.) reveal something much bigger than a lost girl. It’s a massive and complex criminal network that gets the attention of Scotland Yard’s rising star, Superintendent Luke Holborn (Joe Dempsie), who comes to Kingston to help with the investigation.

Since the debut of the acclaimed drama “The Harder They Come” in 1972, films and television shows about Jamaica have been few and far between. Of course, there have been more glamorous glimpses of the island in movies like “Bob Marley: One Love” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back.” But James’ portrayal, directed by Tanya Hamilton, is authentic and immersive. In “Get Millie Black,” Jamaica teeters under the crushing weight and legacy of colonialism. Its society also suffocates under homophobic laws, which keep a burgeoning queer community isolated and under constant threat. The white sandy beaches and the blue waters of the Caribbean Sea are never in the frame here. Instead, viewers are immersed in Millie’s Kingston, where dialogue is spoken almost exclusively in Jamaican patois, where options are limited, gang violence persists and whiteness is still placed on a pedestal.

Beyond this gritty, nuanced view of the lush island, James carefully unpacks the psychological motivations of the story’s central figures. A different character narrates each of the five episodes. (Critics received four for review.) Despite gaining a sister in Hibiscus, Millie has never forgotten the anguish of losing Orville. Therefore, she is forced to rescue as many lost children as she can, without regard for job protocols or her safety and well-being. For her part, Hibiscus is motivated by freedom and the ability to live her life on her terms. Yet her late mother’s hatred and rage haunt her constantly. Luke’s obsession with rising through the ranks at Scotland Yard takes him all the way to Jamaica. Finally, Janet is hyper-fixated on something more simplistic: the life she feels she deserves.

“Get Millie Black” works well as a gory whodunit (with a really unnerving twist in the middle). But the excellent performances and the crimes in this setting make the show unique. James, who based Millie on her mother, Detective Inspector Shirley Dillon-James, presents a deeply engaging world of characters driven by their unbridled impulses and haunted by ghosts they cannot exorcise.

“Get Millie Black” premieres Nov. 25 on HBO, with new episodes released each week on Mondays.